Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

As I was reading the three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences, It was as if I were reading paintings. Modiano’s dream-like sequences had my mind flashing with images from paintings such as those of Monet and other Impressionists . His descriptions are so detailed, that although I am familiar with Paris, I realize I only know only a small part of the city. I wish I could go there now, and trace the places that Modiano so exquisitely describes.

The novellas are classified as fiction but are clearly autobiographical. The narrator looks back at his past and there are events that are distorted or possibly missing, suspended in time.

Afterimage (Chien de printemps)
The narrator is a young man who volunteers to catalog a photographer’s show more works. There is an illusive quality here, and it feels at times that we are in a world blurred like a half-developed photo. Only the place-names are solid.
The narrator loses touch with the photographer, who eventually disappears never to be found. Only the box of photos he leaves behind confirms his reality.

Suspended Sentences (Quartier perdu)
Here the child Patoche and his brother Rudy are growing up parentless in a large house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. They are cared for by a motley group of women.The brothers try to make sense of what they observe, and invent names for their carers such as “Snow White”. They are innocents in an environment that the reader will see as seedy. When Snow White takes them to warehouses and tells them to wait they do so unaware of what is happening inside. Various men come and go,bringing expensive presents for the boys. But the boys see only a fairy land-like place and believe that the Parisian strip clubs are circuses in canvas tents.

Abruptly, like photographer in Afterimage, the adults disappear completely, and Patoche is thrown into the streets of Paris alone. At this stage, we lose sight of Rudy.

Flowers of Ruin (Fleurs de ruine)
Like its title, this novella embraces darkness and ruin. The narrator is suspicious of the past and decides to investigate the unsolved deaths of a couple that occurred in 1933. Although at the time many believed that their deaths were suicides, a strange waiter may have misled the police. The narrator is convinced that this very waiter may have shown up when he was in Paris in the sixties. There is again, reference to warehouses and black-marketing. Perhaps the man was a Nazi collaborator. Or had someone stolen his identity? The men of the Suspended Sentences novella are reimagined. The warehouses, the corruption, the unclear identities.

He meets a man who leads a double-life, who is not as he seems. Could he be the waiter? He claims he is a marquis. The narrator comes across him for the last time where the so-called marquis is a tour guide for submissive Japanese tourists.

The sunny Paris of the AfterImage has gone, and the dark suspicious men of Suspended Sentences return to narrator’s fractured memories. The lightness of the photographer’s photos in Afterimage has gone. The narrator has only one choice; that is to escape France. And there the story ends, suspended in time.

As for the book that contains the novellas, there is no defining plot or logical narrative. Rather the three novellas merge splatter -like into something resembling a Jackson Pollock painting.

Highly recommended. show less

Memory and loss haunt these three novellas. The three narrator’s memories of Paris as boys or younger men are of a city that no longer exists intact. “All those streets were wiped off the map when they built the peripherique, taking with them all their garages and their secrets.”

In the title novella a boy barely sees or knows his travelling parents. On his father: “One evening when I was fifteen, when I was alone with him and he’d strayed very close to confiding a few things.” Modiano’s narrators are searching for and through the past. For parts of the city that hold memories and have been destroyed. For people that have disappeared. Near the end of “Flowers of Ruin” a man standing in the rain appears to dissolve. show more “He had vanished in that sudden way that I’d later notice in other people, like my father, which leaves you so puzzled that you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.”

At times this same narrator seems to accept that it’s impossible to unearth the past: “Why bother chasing ghosts and trying to solve insoluble mysteries, when life was there, in all its simplicity, beneath the sun?” But it doesn’t stop Modiano from trying. show less

Disengagement and inconclusiveness is what Mark Polizzotti, the translator, writes in the introduction to describe the three novellas included in this volume. Although I tend to like to KNOW, somehow I was carried along on this meandering journey that led to nowhere, or at least nowhere you could define. And I loved it. I was in Paris, the people were colorful yet elusive, their colors muted. The places were all exactly named and precisely described. And yet I was lost. But I didn't mind. I loved it. It was, as Polizzotti, says, like Edith Piaf's smoky laments, or Brassai's nocturnal photographs.

These three short novellas — “Afterimage,” “Suspended Sentences,” and “Flowers of Ruin” — originally published over a five year period in the 1990s, share a mood of wistful nostalgia, fleeting and uncertain memory, with an undercurrent of menace. Modiano appears to draw upon his own life, especially his childhood immediately before the years of the Occupation in Paris. On the surface it seems as though he is recounting specific events, drawing together memories. But nothing solid coalesces, as least in terms of plot. Rather we see the city of Paris emerging out of layer after layer of different moments in mid-century, with a steady recitation of street names, addresses, business establishments, and sometimes people, many show more of which no longer exist. It is a Paris that corresponds, perhaps, only to the author’s own memory and imagination. And certainly what, precisely, that Paris evokes is elusive at best.

This is the Paris of noir films, of George Brassai photographs, of fog and shadow, before the construction of the périphérique wiped out whole neighbourhoods and histories, when France was not yet reconciled to its collaborative past during the Occupation, and identities might be lost, invented, or exchanged merely through the theft of someone’s identity papers. That Patrick Modiano can’t settle on a clear image of this time is rather the point. Like his contemporary, W.G. Sebald, he endlessly mines an ineffable recent history in which memory and guilt, culpability and innocence, blur. Unlike Sebald, Modiano is teasing out the threads of familial responsibility rather than national shame. And thus there is always an undertone of accusation, especially against his father and whatever unsavoury acts he may have participated in, either willingly or through coercion, in those dark days.

The writing is almost picaresque as it catches the frothy tops of these waves of memory. It never bogs down or sinks in an effort to explicate fully or justify. Which is not to say that the inconclusive inevitably leads to the unsettled. Rather, Modiano’s embrace of the elusive suggests a wider, more encompassing, comprehension of the whole and an unwillingness to judge it prematurely. Certainly fascinating and definitely recommended. show less

Recently I’ve been wondering if I haven't read enough of these "novels" that seem more memoir than fiction. The first person narrative where the narrator just happens to have the same first name as the author; the narrator's brother with the same name as the author's brother; the author and narrator are the same age (maybe even went to the same schools, churches, vacation spots, etc.); all very autobiographical and all--like much of our memory--fictionalized.

Then I come across another gem and none of those things matter at all. Suspended Sentences is one of these gems. The stories are good, the writing is sublime, and the place is Paris. The three novellas are somewhat connected: the setting is post World II Paris, some of the show more characters appear in more than one of the stories, and they are all the memories of a man trying to piece together mysterious things that happened in his childhood and youth.

The characters are fascinating, the stories are intriguing, and I was overwhelmed with the detailed descriptions of Parisian neighborhoods. This is one of those books that had me keeping a Google Map open on my laptop while I read, following the story through the streets. These stories could only have happened in Paris.

Library copy. show less

SUSPENDED SENTENCES: THREE NOVELLAS, by Patrick Modiano. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti.

Although the three novellas presented here were published separately over a five year period, they blend easily and seamlessly into a unified story of one man's life, from his troubled and unusual childhood well into his adult years. This is probably because of the first person narrative that runs through all three pieces, and also because of the peculiarly autobiographical nature of Modiano's fiction. Indeed the narrator in the stories is even named Patrick (or the diminutive 'Patoche' when he is a child.)

Modiano is apparently a perennially best-selling author in his native France, and yet, at least until he won the Nobel Prize for show more Literature just last year, he has been virtually unnoticed here in the U.S. Various translators are now hard at work in remedying this situation, and Mark Polizzotti's translation here is a beautiful example of bringing Modiano's work to fruition in English.

Modiano's milieu is, for the most part, Paris - but a Paris that has been nearly erased in the past fifty-some years. The sights, sounds and smells of the city from the forties through the sixties and later are nearly characters in these stories, giving them a specificity of setting seldom scene in modern literature.

And that Paris is the scene of Patrick's childhood, one in which his parents are most often absent, and he and his younger brother Rudy are brought up by friends of his parents - has-been circus performers and misfits, often visited by shadowy gangster types and black marketers. His father, who may or may not have been a collaborator during the German occupation of Paris, and was briefly interned in a camp, comes and goes occasionally. His mother, an entertainer, always on tour, is hardly seen at all. Patrick and Rudy are often left to their own devices, raising themselves. Later, you get glimpses of Patrick as a struggling young writer, one who (like the author) continues to write his own life, trying to understand it, and a father who eventually disappears completely from his life.

The overall tone in Modiano's fiction seems to be one of not so much nostalgia, but of longing, a yearning for a Paris that is no longer there. There is a circular, dreamlike kind of style at work here, as the narrator shifts often between past and and present as he meditates on the transience and fragility of life, both his own and that of others. There is the innocence of his childhood self, wondering about adult behavior, juxtaposed with his older self, looking back and still sorting out his parents' lives and behavior and trying to make connections with the still shadowy figures that helped to raise him and passed in and out of his life.

I tried to think of American writers I might compare to Modiano, and I thought of Ward Just, and his novel, THE TRANSLATOR, as well as a more obscure book I read not long ago, Richard Stern's IN ANY CASE, a novel about the French resistance and the Vichy government. And yet Modiano, given the twisting autobiographical nature of his work, remains, I think, in a class by himself. I enjoyed this book very much. Enough so that I expect to read more Modiano as additional works become available in English. Kudos to Mark Polizzotti, his translator here. I will recommend this book highly. show less

Patrick Modiano, age 24, Paris, 1969 - From Flowers of Ruin: "Back then, the gates of Paris where all in vanishing perspectives, the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner."

Patrick Modiano’s prose is all about atmosphere, subtle moods, elusiveness of memory and poetry of feelings. In keeping with the author’s aesthetic of alighting upon specific remembrances as if returning again and again to a particular park bench on foggy Paris evenings, I will focus on Flowers of Ruin, the novella in this collection of three where the images have really stuck with me, repeatedly emerging in my memory, resurfacing, as if, as Ezra Pound put it in show more his short poem, “petals on a wet, black bough.”

We read of the narrator's first obsession noted in Flowers of Ruin, as related in 1986, age forty-seven, the year of his recounting this somber tale: "April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason. It's a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T." Indeed, the unnamed narrator retraces the steps of the couple along deserted Paris streets, consults police reports, scrutinizes isolated clues about how the couple met up with two women and then two men in their random zigzag across Montparnasse that evening, all in an attempt to piece together the actual events leading up to the what newspapers at the time labeled “the tragic orgy.”

Then, as if a dreamy nocturne for piano changing key, the narrator slides into another recollection: after running away from boarding school at age fourteen, he meets someone a bit older then himself in a café, standing at the bar, who offers help and makes a deep, abiding impression. As he puts it: "A pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said: ”What the fuck are you doing here, old top?” I confessed that I was playing hooky.” This reflection fades out, leaving us with the Danish girl’s short blond hair, her periwinkle eyes and her slang words, only to reemerge toward the end of the story with a touch more detail.

Sticking with the metaphor of changing musical key in a piano nocturne, the story takes additional shifts and slides until the narrator conveys how, when in his early twenties, he first encounters an older man in the vicinity of a university who looks like he could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty and goes by the name of Pacheco, a man who comes to dominate much of his reflections: “Where did he really live? I imagine him walking straight ahead, up to the Porte de Versailles, and finally reaching that desolate boulevard that bore the name of his ancestor. He walked along it slowly, suitcase in hand, like a sleepwalker, and at that late hour he was the only pedestrian.”

Once again, the narrator takes on the role of amateur detective, using the two names this man gave him to sift through old newspapers to garner scraps of information. He comes up with a few family facts and confronts Pacheco the very next time he sees him at his usual haunt, a university café. Pacheco replies that he has no idea what he is talking about. Then Pacheco disappears for a time.

The narrator continues his investigation and unearths a few more details, including how Pacheco might be someone who was wanted by the government for colluding with the enemy during the war and might even be a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp. When Pacheco finally reappears, the narrator immediately confronts him with his findings. As readers we wonder why the narrator is so persistent with someone he barely knows. We are eventually given a clue: there exists much in common between Pacheco and the narrator’s father, a businessman whose disappearance and death during the Paris occupation left the narrator with many unanswered questions.

Other men and women, happening and events bloom in Modiano’s Flowers of Ruin, including the alluring Jacqueline and her luxurious fur coat, a young lady the narrator meets and eventually lives with when in Paris during his twenties. But the facts of the story are not exactly what makes Modiano’s writing so hypnotic; rather, it’s the narrator’s ability to draw a reader into the intimacy of his feeling tone, his created Parisian mood as he travels to times past, his very personal impressions as he paints with words as literary counterpoint to a painting by Maurice Utrillo, Gustave Caillebotte or Camille Pisssario.

Above all, for Patrick Modiano, it’s how our memories comes alive and then fade, almost as if they were like the marquis the story’s narrator observes from an upper floor window across a Paris street one rainy night: “Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from failing on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn’t had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my head against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained.” show less